The Amateurs (2 page)

So when John Biglow and Joe Bouscaren had driven down to Princeton together, neither thought of himself as an underdog. Biglow for the first time in a year believed his back did not hinder him, and Bouscaren believed that in the past few months he had reached virtual parity with Wood and Biglow. Bouscaren had been a year ahead of Biglow at Yale, and the two were close friends. On the way down they talked incessantly of rowing, of their bodies and of genetics. Bouscaren seemed fascinated by his body. Sports and competition obsessed him, and no one took better care of himself. He worked on his body and maximized its strength—he was smaller than the other two—and indeed at one time he had thought seriously of making sports medicine his career. He had hoped to go to Dartmouth Medical School, which was for him the perfect medical school in the perfect locale; he could row during the fall and spring and go long-distance skiing during the winter. What more could the body and the mind want? But he had not gotten in and had settled for the urban confines of Cornell Medical School in New York City. On the way down he asked Biglow whether, if he wanted to pass superior genes on to his children, he should choose a wife for her athletic ability. Was it wrong to place too much emphasis on her strength and size? Near the end of the drive, Biglow had turned to Bouscaren and said, "You know, Joe, this is the most important race of our lives." Bouscaren had been silent for a moment. "This is for the Olympics," Biglow said, "this is what we've been working for all these years. Who wins here, goes."

There was something different, almost noble about the Olympian in his mind. Four years ago he had been asked by his Yale friend and teammate Steve Kiesling why he was working so hard in preparation for the 1980 Olympics and he had answered, "the Olympian stands alone." Listening to Biglow talk about the race, Bouscaren had quietly agreed. Biglow, he knew, in his own meticulous way was already concentrating on the race, already
rowing
the race. They were both staying, fittingly enough, with a former Yale oarsman, Donald Beer, class of 1956, who had rowed in a Yale eight that had won an Olympic medal. Beer liked former Yale oarsmen to stay with him in Princeton. His house was a virtual rowing museum, replete with all kinds of souvenirs from the past. One thing above all else that John Biglow knew about the house was that there was an Olympic gold medal in it. Beer, fittingly enough, had once told Biglow, "John, always remember, there's more to life than rowing— but not much."

For the first time in almost thirty years, the United States had a serious chance to win an Olympic medal in the single sculls, albeit the bronze. For the past three years, the American scullers had taken third in the world competition. The last American Olympic single-sculls medal had been a bronze won by John Kelly, Jr., of the Philadelphia bricklaying, rowing and acting Kellys. He had taken the bronze in 1956, in his third Olympic shot (his father had won the gold in 1920 in Antwerp, the last American gold in this event). But in 1981 Biglow, then only twenty-four and rowing in his first international regatta, had surprised everyone by winning a bronze. He had repeated in 1982, and Tiff Wood had taken the bronze in 1983. That meant that there were two world-class scullers competing in Princeton this weekend. And the times of other scullers such as Bouscaren, Jim Dietz and Brad Lewis were only a fraction off the times of these two.

Harry Parker, their coach, did not believe that concentrating the energy of all these talented young men into the single was necessarily a good thing. He wanted to direct some of these people to the double and quadruple sculls. In the double and the quad, the Europeans, who gave sculling a much higher priority, traditionally dominated. In both events teamwork and finesse were more important than sheer power, which worked against the Americans. In Europe young men in their late twenties and early thirties, often handsomely subsidized by the state, devoted long hours to honing their skills. In America, where rowing was subsidized only by parents, scullers usually dropped out in their midtwenties. A part of Parker, never expressed but fervently held, wanted the single-scull trials over. In his heart, he, too, tilted toward Wood, for Wood's rough style was better suited to the single, while Biglow's style would fit the team boats better. In America the team boats were usually patched together at the last minute, the oarsmen given three or four weeks to work out together and then sent to compete against the subsidized European teams, which had been rowing together for three or four, and sometimes seven or eight years.

Nonetheless, Parker, an intensely competitive man himself, was intrigued by the three-way competition he had been watching. He thought that all three of the scullers were so close in ability that there was no real favorite. Bouscaren, because of his size, might be a slight underdog. Both Wood and Biglow were strong enough to make mistakes in a race and still win. That was not true of Bouscaren. Only if he rowed an almost perfect race was he likely to win. Bouscaren amused Parker—Bouscaren competed at every level on every occasion, and the coach had been delighted that spring when a photographer from a national magazine had come by to take photos of the three oarsmen. Parker had watched Bouscaren jockey for position in the photos so that he would not be away from the center and would be as much a part of it as the others. The photographer had kept directing Bouscaren to stand toward one side, and Bouscaren had disregarded him, lest he be cropped out. He competes even at this, Parker had thought.

That Bouscaren competed at photo sessions did not surprise his friend Biglow. In 1981 they had been on the national team. When, at the end of the European tour, a photo had been taken, Bouscaren had stood next to Biglow. Biglow, the taller of the two, noticed that in the picture Bouscaren was standing on tiptoes and that at the very moment the photographer had snapped the shot, Joe had turned aside and was looking at Biglow's shoulder, trying to measure which one of them was taller.

CHAPTER

TWO

Tiff Wood, in order to compete on this weekend, had, as much as anything else, endured. He was five or six years older than most of his competitors. If in real life a generation lasted fifteen or twenty years, in rowing it was much briefer, perhaps only four years. The demands were so heavy, the alternatives so much more pleasurable that few stayed with it very long. Tiff Wood was now competing against young men who had entered college after he had graduated. His contemporaries, those men who had been a part of the same Harvard crew with him, watched his obsession with an odd mixture of admiration, envy and wariness. He had, they believed, been the least likely member of some great Harvard crews of the mid-1970s to stay with rowing. If he had been one of the strongest men on those Harvard boats, he had also been one of the roughest, an oarsman who responded to pressure and challenge by beating his oar even harder into the water and by giving more of himself. Surely, his contemporaries thought, Wood loved rowing, but they also thought he was proving something, too. On a legendary Harvard boat he had been relatively anonymous. Two of his teammates, Al Shealy and Dick Cashin, had become famous, at least famous by the standards of crew, and Shealy in particular had displayed an unusual gift for generating publicity. His boatmate Cashin felt that anywhere else and on any other boat Tiff Wood might have been a god, a god being the phrase that oarsmen used to describe someone who was a true star. But on that boat, his name had been known to few outside the inner world of rowing. Now he was competing for the right to be the dominant oarsman in America. In any real sense he had postponed his adult life.

There was, when he reached his midtwenties, something of a ritual to the manner in which he would get ready to quit rowing and then decide to stay on. He would call his father and say well, that was it, he had had enough, he was getting out. Then he would ponder the possibilities of the future and his own improvement, for he
was
getting better as a sculler, and he would decide to stay on. But for just one more year. In 1979, the vision of the 1980 Olympics had sustained him. In 1981 there had been the rise of John Biglow, a new challenge to deal with. By 1982, responding to Biglow, he had improved his technique dramatically. By 1983 he was rowing better than ever and suddenly the Olympics did not seem so distant. So he would call his father and say that well, yes, he was going to try it again. Just one more season. His father thought the Olympics loomed above all the other goals.

Tiff Wood had spent several years, and most particularly the past week, continuing to conquer all of the factors that threaten the individual in single sculling, above all the loneliness and the emptiness of working out alone at odd, cold and unpleasant hours. There were many moments when the impulse to quit was overwhelming. In team sports, the athletes were bonded by each other, and there was immense peer pressure to keep going. One dared not miss a practice for fear of letting his teammates down. Every time an athlete thought of getting back in bed in the morning he knew he would have to face the anger of his closest friends. But the sculler had to find motivation entirely within himself. No one else cared. The transition from sweep oarsman to sculler, was, Wood thought, largely a mental one; the difference in technique was negligible. He was fascinated by what his friend Charley Altekruse was going through. Altekruse had been a distinguished sweep oarsman at Harvard, and the physical adjustment to sculling was relatively easy for him. The handwork was more delicate, a hand on each oar instead of one oar manipulated by two hands. In addition, sculling demanded more pure strength than sweep rowing. But the mental adjustment had been much tougher. Altekruse hated to work out alone and had an almost pathological need for someone to share workouts with him. He was always calling Wood or one of the other scullers up to see if they could work out together, even if it only meant running up and down the stadium steps.

Wood knew what loneliness was like. The only pressure was the pressure from within. Harry Parker, the Olympic coach and his coach on and off for some fourteen years, was a flinty and unsentimental man. Tiff Wood knew that if he went to Parker one morning and told him that sculling was too much, that he no longer had the taste for it, there would be neither surprise nor disappointment on Parker's face. Parker would accept the decision without questioning it. He would probably not even ask Tiff if he was sure that he had made the right decision. Harry Parker accepted only those who were already motivated. That was a premise of rowing. He had no time for providing inspiration.

American scullers tended to be former sweep oarsmen—that is, they had rowed on an eight-oar shell using only one oar each. In college, rowing had been the overriding—indeed, obsessive—preoccupation for them. Upon graduation, uncertain of what they wanted to do professionally, they usually decided to stay with rowing a little longer. The choice became to find seven, three or one other oarsman to row with every day, or to row a single scull. Many of them became scullers. But after about three or four years, even the best went on to graduate school or to work on Wall Street. Probably they were leaving sculling, Wood thought, just when they were getting better. His own body was much stronger now than it had been four or five years earlier (though the one thing he learned was that he needed more time to recuperate from all-out races than when he was younger). But the temptations of a normal life were strong, and it became harder every year to lead a life of such immense daily denial. Take his own training program, he said. The sky of predawn Boston during the winter months was not gray, it was black. There was a sense of acute loneliness sharpened by a wrenching cold. No sane person with an alternative to a better and easier life, a
privileged
life, was up and exercising at that hour.

"You have to force yourself to stay with rowing," Wood said. "If you put the first of the contact lenses in your eye, that is almost a sure guarantee that you won't go back to sleep. If you can get up and get past the bed, then you will reach the kitchen. If you can reach the kitchen, then you can reach the front door. If you reach the front door, you will reach the car, and if you reach the car, you can reach the boathouse. Each step leads to the next one. You keep pushing yourself so that you will not quit. You have to know when to listen to your body, because there is a part of you that always wants to quit and go back to sleep, and there is also a part of your body which on occasion is worn out and wants and needs rest, and then you have to listen." There were times when Wood hated his regimen, simply hated what he was doing and wanted desperately to be free. Yet he kept getting up and forcing himself to do what he thought he should do. Worst of all, in the winter the sheer pleasure of rowing was gone, the exhilaration of making so light a boat go fast was replaced by the painful and boring hours of work indoors. The speed was the pleasure for Wood. In an age of jet propulsion, the single scull might move only thirteen or fourteen miles an hour and weigh just under thirty pounds, but nonetheless it felt fast. Larger boats demanded
shared
strength; here he was all on his own. On the days when he rowed well, the pleasure was almost unimaginable.

In the nine years since he had graduated from college, he had held some quite good jobs, but there had never been any doubt that rowing came first. He had liked his job as an actuarial expert in Hartford after college, and Hartford, where the insurance man was king, was a wonderful city for that profession. But he had transferred to a consulting firm in Boston because Boston offered Harvard, the Charles River, some of the best rowing facilities in the world, other young men interested in the sport to compete against and Harry Parker. Wood liked the consulting firm; the people there had been very good to him, allowing him to adjust his work schedule to his rowing needs and even paying him half salary in those years when, preoccupied with rowing, he had showed up part time. Most of his college classmates were pursuing business careers in New York, which they saw as a faster track than Boston. That might well be true, and it was possible that Tiff Wood was jeopardizing his career, but New York was a terrible place in which to row singles.